![]() This would normally present a principle-agent problem, but it was not an issue for Xalisco dealers. Another distinctive aspect of the Xalisco boys business model is that dealers earn a salary, whereas typically drugs are sold on commission. Quinones attributes this partly to their “pizza delivery” business model as compared to traditional corner slinging, but mostly to the thick interconnected ties based in a small rancho back home where everybody knows everybody. Competing heroin crews had an approach of friendly competition rather than violent turf wars over territory. Notwithstanding a handful of murders in the book, Xalisco dealers generally eschewed violence and never carry guns. Social capital also plays a strong role in explaining how Xalisco drug crews operated, which was distinct from most drug dealers. This envy is something Quinones emphasizes repeatedly and the way it is formed by public feasting and is sublimated into a need to reciprocate so as to restore honor, which in turn creates the labor supply for black tar heroin retailing as men seek another bundle of cash through which to engage in such honorable public profligacy. Interestingly, while dealers often planned to save enough wages to capitalize a small business, they tended to dissipate their wealth in gifts to family and “the rest on beer, strip clubs, and cocaine, and walked the streets of Xalisco for a week or two the object of other men’s envy” (261). ![]() Xalisco-style potlatch can occur whenever a migrant returns with suitcases full of Levis 501s to disburse to a receiving line of supplicants, but is especially centered on the corn festival, where migrants would compete by sponsoring banda performances (104). ![]() But relative deprivation is too weak to explain Xalisco life, which is better characterized as competitive feasting straight out of Mauss’s The Gift. As more and more dealer-migrants return to Xalisco flush with cash this creates a new standard of living in the village and transforms being an impoverished sugar cane farmer from just how life goes to a status that can be rejected. The dealers who come up from Xalisco, Nayarit to live for a few months in spartan conditions working long hours driving around with balloons of dope in their mouths are motivated by relative deprivation. ![]() In no particular order, here are a few of the themes I noticed. As I remarked on Twitter, my discipline of sociology could very well treat Dreamland the same way political scientists treat History of the Peloponnesian War. What made the book amazing to me even knowing the broad contours of the social facts it describes was how every detail of the book illustrated and illuminated another aspect of sociology. I’ve watched every episode of Justified and read Case and Deaton PNAS 2015, so I was not surprised by the broad argument of the book that a shift in medicine towards prescribing opiates created ubiquitous chemical dependence that was eventually met by black tar heroin, all of which disproportionately affected rust belt white people. Dreamland provides a unified story of the opiate epidemic starting in the late 1990s with both the overall social trend and close-ups on the lives of dealers, addicts, doctors, cops, epidemiologists, and mourners. It only took a few days over which every other activity was a distraction from finishing the book. They Meant Us No Harm, But Only Gave Us the LotusĪfter hearing Sam Quinones on EconTalk, I finally stopped procrastinating and read Dreamland.
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